Did You Know That It Is Against The Law For A Black Woman To Travel Alone?

The words uttered to me by a pig sonofabitch at the airport in Tobago.

What a shoddy end to a great holiday. I will be back with pictures in the next few blogs, but for now I must share this trauma.

Imagine this…

I had checked in my two pieces of luggage and had an hour and a half until departure. I went to the bar opposite the airport (the airport is tiny) for some rum and cokes with the little money that I had left, when I heard my name being broadcast all over the frickin airport on a tannoy.

I didn’t catch what exactly what was being said with my name but whatever they were saying my name was repeated THREE times. I thought that perhaps I had missed something and the flight was leaving earlier than scheduled and I was late boarding. I downed my drink and rushed to gate 3 where my flight was scheduled to leave from. I told a man at the gate my name and was left standing while my name was being passed around in hushed tones like I was the target of some ongoing surveillance operation. Finally I was directed to a woman sitting behind a desk who told me,

“I am police.”

She then went on to ask me some “security” questions that mostly centred around the “kind of work” I do. After 5 minutes or so of this she went on to tell me,

“You are going to have to come with me to find your bags.”

At first I thought that maybe it was something to do with the three bottles of rum, coffee liquer and numerous bottles of pepper sauce that I had packed, but what could they possibly want to say about that? I always buy alcohol and pepper sauce wherever I go and it’s never been a problem.

I followed her and a male police officer that she had got hold of to a dim dusty dirt floor room that had piles of suitcases all over the place. They told me to find my case. What kind of nonsense? So I had to walk around this room with suitcases tossed all over the place and find my case. My bags didn’t even have a lock. I was wondering why they didn’t just search it while I was drinking my rum and coke instead of dragging me to this room to start rifling through case after case.

When I found my bags they double checked the tag numbers to make sure that I had picked the right ones and not phonies. They then hauled them one by one onto a wooden table to start the search. By now I’m thinking it must be for drugs, but who even does that these days? I thought that most smugglers/mules/carriers swallow the stuff. Meanwhile they were throwing questions at me, mostly the same ones about my job, as if, if I were going to lie I’d forget the lie I had told ten minutes previously!

“What do you do in England?”
Cook up crack on my kitchen stove

What did you do in Tobago?
Meet with fellow dealers, pushers and mules

Why are you by yourself?
Pimpin ain’t EZ. I need to focus and keep my pimp hand strong

Where did you stay?
In a crack house

Did you go to Trinidad?
Yes

What for?
To meet more criminals

Blah blah blah and so it went on the same questions over and over and reworded, and no matter what I answered, it was clear from the looks on their faces that they did not believe me.

After going through everything in my case as well as opening up chocolates, sweets and bottles, they tore up my suitcase and when I say that I mean literally by ripping apart the lining. I was pissed because the stitching at the bottom of the case was already loose and these motherfuckers just stuck the nail into the coffin. I saw the wood structure that was holding the case together because the bitches tore the lining apart.

Then out came the pepper sauces, the rum and the inevitable questions.

“What are these?” DUH

“Where did you by them?

I brought out my supermarket receipts from my make up bag. Lucky I had them. I can always predict some shit like this will go down. After they figured that I didn’t make the bottles myself in my crackden/drug factory they figured that I had fiddled with the bottles and jars. They were shaking up stuff, turning stuff upside down, pressing their fingers along seals and then started opening shit and making me taste it.

Bitch eyeing and feeling up my coffee liquer talking about,

“Me really feel say fe open dis.”

She was getting excited as if she had just discovered my drug stash was in the bottle.

Go on then! (From drug mule to liquid bomber… oh how things change in a matter of minutes)

I was not a happy bunny at all. Then came the score and a half of Nollywood films I bought from Trinidad. They started inspecting them and I thought they might get confiscated for copyright violated, but it was ok, after opening all of them up and discovering there was no Colombian White inside the cases they were replaced.

I asked the guy if he was looking for drugs. He said that he was. All praises for his honesty (even though he is still a sonofabitch) because instead of that “Its random” bullshit they normally try and feed me, he told me straight,

“We looked at your departure card and passport and your profile is alarming.”

ALARMING… WTF?

He said the places I travelled to were “notorious.”

That made me laugh. I have only had this passport for two years (after they told me that my last one looked doctored) and the stamps are Gambia, Senegal, The USA and Brazil… ooooh drug hotspots of the world right? Just because his bitchass stays in the same place every day of his life, I’m supposed to be happy doing the same?

Can’t happen.

I then said that it was “so typical” for me to get stopped, that is when he uttered those words,

“You must be doing something wrong.”

Oh yeah because I dare to leave my house I am doing “something wrong.”

He then added that it was “strange” for me to be alone. I found that quite offensive because when white women travel alone they are,

Travellers

Explorers

Jetsetters

When a black woman travels alone she is a drug mule, courier or smuggler. What a fucking joke. I shouldn’t have expected any different, after all it is a well known fact that if we black women are not selling our asses, being hoochie mamas on MTV then we are either taking the drugs or smuggling them *end sarcasm*

< FONT>
Where I was staying had a few white women who were there alone. I bet none of them get such treatment. I can bet my life on it none of their profiles will be “alarming.” This whole situation takes me to being on the beach with Terje a blonde blue eyed chick from Estonia. She was talking about becoming a dive instructor and the countries she was thinking about working in. I asked her how easy it is to get visas for some of the places and she said to me,

“When you are young, white, blomde and attractive like me you can go anywhere. Visa is not a problem. They will get you visa. They always want people like me”

So I replied to the sonofabitch,

“I should stay at home right?”

“Well…”

“Maybe try some bleach?”

-Silence-

Yeah keep quiet you cotton picking fool.

After the search was over they kept my suitcases to put on the plane and then took me back to the police desk to take down my name and address. I was thinking they were trying to put me on a list to have me Xrayed at the airport back in the UK, but luckily that didn’t happen, because after waiting an hour and a half for my luggage at Gatwick because of “staff shortages” I would have been PISSED if they tried to Xray me too.

I have decided that I need to print up a Tshirt to wear to the airport in future instances that I get on a plane alone.

On the front it will say:

YES I AM BLACK
I KNOW THIS MEANS I AM NOT “RANDOM”

And on the back it will say:

BUT I AM NOT A CRIMINAL SO LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE

Scratch that… I’ll probably get arrested on check in. On second thoughts I’ma get me some bleach and a blonde weave, and on failing that I can try and find out where Mike got those pills to make him glow in the dark and start popping them.

Comments

At least you talked back to him instead of silently letting him get away with that. Airports can be funny places. One of my friends is half English half Arab, every time he flies back into the UK he gets asked what the “purpose of his visit” is at passport control at Heathrow/Gatwick/etc. But he lives in the UK and is a UK national with a full UK passport! So firstly he shouldn't be questioned, second, he isn't “visiting”.

The whole profiling idea really is so unbelievably retarded when you think about it because the drug lords probably ship their drugs off to Europe through that “jetsetter” sat next to you on the flight back…